The present disclosure relates generally to the field of semiconductor manufacturing and, more particularly, to a system and method for tape-out requests.
The semiconductor integrated circuit (IC) industry has experienced rapid growth. Technological advances in IC materials and design have produced generations of ICs where each generation has smaller and more complex circuits than the previous generation. However, these advances have increased the complexity of processing and manufacturing ICs and, for these advances to be realized, similar developments in IC processing and manufacturing have been needed.
Furthermore, as the IC industry has matured, the various operations needed to produce an IC may be performed at different locations by a single company or by different companies that specialize in a particular area. This further increases the complexity of producing ICs, as companies and their customers may be separated not only geographically, but also by time zones, making effective communication more difficult. For example, a first company (e.g., an IC design house) may design a new IC, a second company (e.g., an IC foundry) may provide the processing facilities used to fabricate the design, and a third company may assemble and test the fabricated IC. A fourth company may handle the overall manufacturing of the IC, including coordination of the design, processing, assembly, and testing operations.
Whether in the context of a single facility or multiple facilities, communication issues may present problems in a number of areas, such as in the fabrication of IC's designed by a customer. For example, in IC manufacturing processes that use a photomask to create such devices as application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) or multi project wafers (MPWs), the mask design generally involves communication between customers and mask manufacturing facilities. The process of preparing and finalizing mask design information for an IC (e.g., mask design tape-out) generally involves both the customer ordering the IC and engineers from the manufacturing facility. The customer may provide tape-out information to a manufacturing facility using a number of different formats. This introduces additional complexity into the tape-out process, as engineers from the manufacturing facility may need to manually check the data provided by the customer and communicate with the customer regarding aspects of the tape-out information that are unclear or incorrect.
Accordingly, what is needed is an improved system and method for mask design tape-out in IC manufacturing.